Call it Deepa Goes to Hollywood. Indo-Canadian filmmaker Deepa Mehta, nominated for an Academy Award in the category of best foreign language film for Water, is enjoying the Oscar hoopla so much that she's thinking of making a movie about the experience. "The whole sort of hype is fascinating," Mehta told The Globe and Mail yesterday. "You can't put it down, because it really is fun. It's all material for another script," she joked.
Although she resides in Toronto, the director was in town only briefly, appearing at a Reel Canada Film Festival screening of Water at a city high school. The 57-year-old director appeared buoyant and enthusiastic despite keeping to a demanding schedule that has her jetting off to Los Angeles tomorrow after a four-day publicity blitz for Water in India last week.
The film, concerning the oppression of widows in India in the 1930s, hits Indian theatres on March 9. While there, the Dehli-born-and-educated Mehta saw no signs of the turbulence that greeted her when she attempted to film the movie in 2000. Hindu nationalists -- who deemed the movie anti-Hindu -- protested violently against the production, burning sets and effigies, and issuing death threats.
Asked about the reception of the film when it opens there, Mehta expected no controversy. "The political climate has changed over the last six years," she explained, citing the secular government in power now.
Deepa Mehta. (Louie Palu/The Globe and Mail)
Photogallery
Internet Links
- Test your Oscar trivia
- Guess the dress: Test your Oscar fashion IQ
- Liam Lacey on the best picture nominees
- Photogallery: Oscar's most outrageous moments
- Oscar poll: See you how you compare
- Photogallery: And the nominees are...
- Globe Oscar contest
- Full list of Oscar nominations
The film's production, shut down after only one day's filming, eventually was made six years later -- shot secretly (under the pseudonym "River Moon") in Sri Lanka. Water, the third instalment of a trilogy that includes Fire and Earth, grossed $4-million in the United States and $2.2-million in Canada. As to its prospects in India, Mehta saw the film's chances of success there as a matter of luck. "My father, who was a film distributor in India, always said there were two things in life you never know about," she said. "One is when you're going to die, and the other is how a film is going to do."
The director will not be in India for Water's opening. She's fast at work at her new film, Exclusion, inspired by a real-life drama of the Komagata Maru, a ship carrying Indian refugees turned back from Vancouver by Canadian authorities in 1914.
Glamorous festivities await her at the Academy Awards, but Mehta, who describes herself as "absolutely a non-schmoozer," is not getting too caught up in things. "You can't take it very seriously."
As for her red-carpet attire, Mehta plans to drape herself in an Indian sari -- and not a specially prepared one either. "I'm not a designer kind of person," she said. "It's my mother's sari -- how more traditional can you get?"
14
